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The Gary (Indiana) Community School Corp. has placed the principal of Bailly Preparatory Academy, Carlita Royal, on paid leave and taken the first steps to fire three teachers. The moves come after a teacher gave a fifth-grade student with autism an award for “Most Annoying Male” at the school’s year-end awards ceremony in front of other students and parents. The school district is refusing to identify the three teachers.
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Soon, some of you will try to make “better babies.”
Already, people pay labs to examine embryos so they can pick ones with DNA they like. Some screen for gender or eye color. Some screen out certain diseases.
So far, they’ve been limited to selecting genes that exist in the parents. They haven’t designed genes. But that is about to change.
Chinese scientists recently altered DNA in human embryos.
The designed babies—twin sisters—were born with immunity to common strains of HIV, claims the scientist responsible. (The added gene might also shorten lifespans. Most scientists say it’s too soon to gene-edit humans safely.)
“He was put under house arrest…and the Chinese are right to punish that scientist,” says Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts’ medical school in my new video.
Most Americans agree.
In one STAT-Harvard poll, 83 percent said creating more intelligent or stronger babies via gene-editing should be illegal.
“Of course they say that,” says Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan. “When you have any kind of intervention into the body that’s new, people think it’s icky. And they take that feeling of ‘ickiness’ and they moralize and think it’s a moral objection.”
Those intuitions threaten medical innovation, says Brennan.
Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of the 43rd president, voiced her moral concerns on Megan Kelly’s TV show. She asked, “I mean where does it stop? There should be things that we leave up to God.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to take her word for it,” scoffs Brennan. “If God appears before me and says, ‘Don’t do this,’ I’ll stop.”
But why would God say stop?
We already give our kids music lessons, braces, tutoring, karate lessons—any advantage we can. Why not also give them better genes?
Imagine, says Brennan, a world where people are much smarter—maybe smart enough to avoid wars, to take us easily to other planets, and to do other things we can’t even imagine.
“Maybe we’ll turn them into X-Men,” he says, referring to the mutant superheroes in films like the just-released Dark Phoenix.
It would be good to have real X-Men around, saving lives.
Another objection to “customizing” babies is that at first only rich people will be able to pay for it. “This is going to be a new way to create disparities in wealth,” says Krimsky.
Brennan counters that you could say this about most new things.
“Every bit of technology that we enjoy today follows the same pattern. You look in your automobile, and you have a CD player or an MP3 player and a GPS…. All of these things, when they first became available, were incredibly expensive…. The rich pay the infrastructure to develop the technologies, and then they spread…become commonplace for everybody to have.”
While the rich do often get there first, they also pay for the expensive failures, and they help fund the technologies that get everyone else there second.
Rich people got airplane travel and Lasik surgery first, but I wouldn’t want those things banned because of that. A free, competitive market is the best way to ensure prices come down.
“Even if the price came down for this,” claims Krimsky, “it would create more injustice.”
I accused Krimsky of being an old fuddy-duddy who likes serving on government committees and fears change. In the ’70s, he opposed in vitro fertilization.
“I love change!” he responded. “But…there are some things we shouldn’t be fiddling around with.”
Most countries’ governments agree. They’ve banned creation of designer babies.
But it’s going to happen anyway.
The U.S. bans sale of kidneys, observes Brennan, but “that doesn’t mean people don’t buy kidneys. They just go and buy them elsewhere.”
Banning designer baby technology, he predicts, “will just guarantee that it will be available only to the super-rich and only to the politically well-connected.”
I think Brennan’s right. Designed babies are coming. If not here, then the genetic engineering will happen somewhere.
The U.S. shouldn’t keep this technology from those of us who want to give it a try.
Our descendants should have the right to use science to make themselves all that they can be.
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Prescription drug monitoring programs do not seem to be very effective at preventing abuse of opioids or other controlled substances. Yet PDMPs amount to a massive invasion of patient privacy, inviting unconstrained government snooping that violates our Fourth Amendment rights.
The number of states with PDMPs tripled between 2001 and 2012, from 16 to 49. These programs are aimed mainly at reducing deaths involving prescription analgesics by preventing “doctor shopping,” the practice of obtaining multiple prescriptions from different physicians and filling them at different pharmacies.
But as John Lilly, a family doctor in Springfield, Missouri, notes in the latest issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, doctor shopping was never very common, and PDMPs do not seem to have curtailed it. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the percentage of “nonmedical” users who directly or indirectly obtained opioids through multiple prescriptions rose from 3.6 percent in 2011 to 4.8 percent in 2014.
The survey’s questions about prescription drugs changed in 2015, so the numbers for more recent years are not directly comparable. But Lilly calculates that doctor shopping that year accounted for 2.3 percent of prescription opioid “misuse,” a rate that fell to 1.7 percent in 2016 before rising to 2.5 percent in 2017.
“Since doctor shopping was the source of only 2.5% of misused pain medicine in 2017,” Lilly writes, “it is clear that the problem is not doctor shopping. Even with the entire country under a PDMP, this small percentage is increasing, but 97.5% of the misused opioids will never be identified by a PDMP.”
Meanwhile, deaths involving prescription analgesics continued to rise from 2011 through 2017, while deaths involving all opioids—primarily illicitly produced heroin, fentanyl, and fentanyl analogs—more than doubled. PDMPs may have contributed to that trend by deterring analgesic prescriptions and driving nonmedical users, along with some legitimate patients, into the black market, where the drugs are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable. Several studies have found that PDMPs are associated with increased deaths involving illicit drugs.
The privacy cost of PDMPs is harder to measure but nevertheless undeniable. New Hampshire is currently engaged in a legal battle with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which asserts the authority to obtain PDMP information through administrative subpoenas rather than the probable-cause warrants required by state law.
Relying on the “third-party doctrine,” the DEA argues that it does not need a warrant because examining PDMP records does not qualify as a search under the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that no warrant is required to obtain information that people voluntarily share with third parties such as banks and phone companies.
But last year the Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to cellphone location data, noting that such information is collected automatically and “provides an intimate window into a person’s life.” The American Civil Liberties Union, joined by the New Hampshire Medical Society, argues that the logic of that decision clearly applies to information about the medications people take.
The ACLU notes that patients do not in any meaningful sense consent to the collection of their prescription records. If they seek medical treatment and it involves a prescription drug covered by New Hampshire’s PDMP law, that information is automatically added to the database, where it stays for three years.
Furthermore, the ACLU says, a patient’s prescription records include highly sensitive information that “can reveal her physician’s confidential medical advice, her chosen course of treatment, her diagnosis, and even the stage or severity of her disorder or disease.” Letting federal drug warriors peruse those records at will not only compromises patients’ privacy; it could have a chilling effect on medical treatment, deterring people from seeking care and confiding in their physicians.
It’s debatable whether these burdens would be acceptable even if PDMPs worked as intended. Given their actual track record, the sacrifices they entail are even harder to justify.
© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
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The headline I quote in this post’s title is from Fox News; here’s more from the body of the article:
The Trump campaign on Tuesday mocked Biden over his use of the phrase. Both Trump and Biden are in Iowa Tuesday holding dueling political events.
“No word yet on whether Biden will start borrowing ‘Basta!’ as well,” Trump campaign deputy communications director Matt Wolking said Tuesday, referring to the hashtag Avenatti often used on Twitter.
Fox News has requested comment from the Biden campaign.
Biden last week faced criticism after it was revealed that his campaign lifted passages from numerous other sources in the initial version of its climate change plan. Citations were later added, with the campaign describing the initial version as a mistake.
Matt Margolis (PJ Media) labels this outright “plagiariz[ing].”
But the phrase wasn’t Avenatti’s to “rip off,” nor is there anything wrong with “lift[ing]” a short line like that. As with many pithy phrases, they have been reused and likely reinvented for decades (if not more), and their original sources are often not remembered. A quick Lexis search revealed that Sen. Ted Kennedy used it on Mar. 11, 2005, in a speech on cutting child poverty; Anita Hill was quoted on Nov. 14, 1992 as having used it shortly before; Sen. Rick Santorum’s campaign used it in 2011; novelist Joe Klein (author of Primary Colors) used it in a 2001 novel; and Langston Hughes had used it in a 1935 poem called “Let America Be America again,” which Sen. John Kerry used in his 2004 campaign. Novelist Joe Kl
Plagiarism can be a serious offense, for instance when journalists or academics copy others’ work without attribution—both because journalists and academics are supposed to be original, and because the copying is usually of a material amount.
But politicians aren’t supposed to be original; they are supposed to adapt good ideas from others. I’m not terribly upset by Biden’s past copying from other sources, whether as to his campaign’s borrowing material for his climate plan, or even as to the copying of parts of Neil Kinnock’s speech back in his 1988 Presidential campaign. (The real problem there, as I recall, was that that his use of Kinnock’s words as his own end up misrepresenting aspects of his own background.)
Indeed, to the extent the Biden campaign was faulted for copying material from activists, I would think the activists should be pleased: The whole point of advocacy is to get decisionmakers to adopt your ideas, and if they even use your words, all the better. That’s why lawyers don’t get upset about judges’ borrowing their words (with some exceptions not relevant here).
But when we’re talking about a five word phrase, the claims of improper borrowing (whether labeled as “plagiariz[ing]” or as “rip[ping] off”) by a politician strike me as completely unsound. It’s a phrase that comes easily to people’s minds, especially in the wake of President Trump’s “Make America Great Again”; it wasn’t original when Avenatti used it, or when Kennedy used it, or likely even when Langston Hughes used it.
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Teachers’ unions frequently oppose charter schools. Nowhere has that been more true than in California, where union leaders zeroed in on charters during the massive teachers’ strike that occurred this past January in Los Angeles.
The California Policy Charter School Task Force—created as a result of the workplace negotiations in that strike—released a report this week recommending strict limitations on charter schools. Charters, which receive public funding but are independently run, typically aren’t unionized, so their proliferation siphons off potential dues-paying members from the union.
Critics also take issue with how charters are regulated, as the schools aren’t always beholden to the same requirements as traditional public schools, and charters themselves are often subject to different oversight standards. The California Policy Charter School Task Force, which includes both union and charter school representatives, unanimously endorsed the creation of a statewide entity to standardize oversight requirements across all charters. A majority of the board also wants to establish universal guidelines, “such as rubrics or handbooks,” for charter applications.
But increasing such regulations on charters is a flawed approached, particularly when considering that the schools are known for employing innovative approaches to education. Why hobble charter schools with unnecessary new requirements?
The California Policy Charter School Task Force report also advises that a one-year moratorium be placed on new virtual charter schools, during which time researchers would delve into their operational practices and procedures to ensure they provide an adequate education.
In addition, the report recommends that school districts be granted almost full discretion in authorizing or denying charters, and says that districts should be permitted to reject a charter petition based on the “fiscal impact” it poses. In other words, a school district could rebuff a new charter if officials felt the competition would burden the existing public schools in the area. That requirement would almost surely doom many new charters from getting started.
The report is now in the hands of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). We’ll have to wait and see how seriously he takes its recommendations.
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The House of Representatives may vote before the end of the week to lift a longstanding legal barrier to scientific research into both marijuana and psychedelic drugs like ecstasy and magic mushrooms.
An amendment offered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) would abolish a rider that’s been attached to federal spending bills since 1996 prohibiting federal spending on “any activity that promotes the legalization of any drug or other substance in Schedule I” of the Controlled Substances Act. In effect, the rider is a ban on all research into the benefits and risks of many recreational drugs, because any institution—like a university—that tried to research a Schedule I drug could lose its federal funding for unrelated projects.
“This bill is likely to encourage more government-funded and private research,” says Brad Burge, communications director for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. “A big benefit will be the elimination of the stigma around that research.”
Michael Collins, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, told Forbes that the budget rider language had “served as a gag rule on government employees discussing the benefits of legalization.”
But the conversation about the benefits—and potential risks—of using marijuana and psychedelics is now happening, whether Congress likes it or not. Clearing the way for additional research into those drugs will help craft public policy regarding their use, and could open the door to additional medical uses.
In a series of tweets after introducing the amendment on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez touted the potential of psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, for treating individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “It’s well past time we take drug use out of criminal consideration,” she wrote. “The War on Drugs has caused so much harm. It’s time to reverse it.”
Indeed, psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, are enjoying a sudden breakthrough in public opinion—one that coincides with greater demand for studying how they affect the brain. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote last month, shortly before voters in Denver narrowly legalized magic mushrooms for recreational use, “the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of psilocybin as a treatment for depression, which seems increasingly likely now that the agency has deemed it a ‘breakthrough therapy,’ may help shift public opinion. The fact that neither addiction nor fatal overdose are salient concerns in connection with psilocybin also should help, notwithstanding the drug’s relatively limited appeal.”
Even the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which has long opposed the legalization of marijuana, now admits that federal barriers to researching the drug are too high. In January, Susan Weiss, research director at NIDA, criticized the “complex and lengthy registration process” that would-be cannabis researchers have to complete, as well as the fact that researches must source their marijuana from a single government-approved grower.
All of that could change if Ocasio-Cortez’ proposal is included in the “minibus” spending bill expected to be voted on later this week. It’s not yet clear whether the amendment will survive a floor vote (or whether it would be subsequently approved by the Senate), but it has already overcome the first hurdle. The amendment cleared the House Rules Committee, which controls whether amendments can be offered on the floor as potential attachments to other pieces of legislation, on Monday night, opening a path for it to be included in the spending bill.
Ocasio-Cortez’ proposal enjoys bipartisan backing, with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) announcing their support on Monday.
“That’s huge,” says Burge of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Even if this attempt at ending the longstanding prohibition on drug research fails, he points out, the effort will “really help us when it comes to outreach to other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.”
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A widely cited 2014 study, reported in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that medical marijuana laws were associated with lower rates of opioid-related mortality between 1999 and 2010. Supporters of marijuana reform have frequently invoked that study, written by University of Pennsylvania researcher Marcus Bachhuber and two co-authors, as evidence that letting people use cannabis for medical and/or recreational purposes helps reduce opioid-related deaths. Not so fast, say the authors of a study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, who extended the analysis for another seven years and found no such association.
The researchers, led by Stanford psychiatrist Chelsea Shover, replicated the results of Bacchuber et al.’s study for the period from 1999 through 2012. But they found that “the association became equivocal in 2013,” and “by 2017 it had reversed such that a study conducted in that year might lead some to conclude that medical cannabis laws were compounding opioid overdose mortality.”
Shover et al. caution against drawing that conclusion, however. “The observed association between these two phenomena is likely spurious rather than a reflection of medical cannabis saving lives 10 [years] ago and killing people today,” they write. “Medical cannabis users are about 2.5% of the population, making it unlikely that they can significantly alter population-wide indices. Unmeasured variables likely explain both associations (e.g., state incarceration rates and practices, naloxone availability, and the extent of insurance and services).”
When Shover et al. limited their analysis to states that only allow medical use of low-THC cannabis extracts, they found a negative correlation with opioid-related deaths. Looking just at states with “comprehensive medical cannabis law[s],” they found a positive correlation. In states that have legalized cannabis for recreational as well as medical use, there was a negative correlation. Only the second result was statistically significant, and barely so. Nevertheless, this is not the pattern you would expect to see if increased legal access to marijuana had a measurable impact on deaths involving opioids, either negative or positive.
Shover et al.’s method differs in a potentially important way from the approach taken in two other studies suggesting that access to medical marijuana reduces opioid-related mortality. While Shover et al., like Bacchuber et al., focus on states with medical marijuana laws, the two other studies asked whether patients actually had ready access to cannabis.
A 2018 study, reported in the Journal of Health Economics, found that merely having a medical marijuana law was associated with lower rates of opioid-related death until 2010. After that there was no apparent benefit from medical marijuana laws per se, but states with “legally protected and operational dispensaries” continued to see reductions, suggesting that “broader access to medical marijuana facilitates substitution of marijuana for powerful and addictive opioids.” That study was based on data through 2013, so Shover et al.’s study includes four more years.
A 2019 study, reported in the Economics Bulletin, likewise found that “states with active legal dispensaries see a drop in opioid death rates over time.” That study covered the years 1999 through 2015, ending two years before Shover et al.’s analysis does.
In addition to covering more years, Shover et al. define medical marijuana access more broadly than those two earlier studies did. While Shover et al. distinguish between states with “low-THC only medical cannabis law[s]” (where CBD oil is legal, sometimes only notionally, for a short list of conditions) and states with “comprehensive medical cannabis law[s]” (where a broader range of cannabis products are legal for a broader range of conditions), they implicitly treat passage of such laws as equivalent to legal access, which is often misleading.
Shover et al.’s data set, for example, indicates that they counted Arizona, where the first medical marijuana dispensary did not open until December 2012, as a state with a “comprehensive medical cannabis law” from 2011 through 2017. Arkansas, where the first dispensary opened last month, gets credit for such a law in 2017 and part of 2016. Hawaii is listed as a state with a comprehensive law from 2000 on, but legal sales did not begin there until 17 years later. There are similar issues with Shover et al.’s treatment of other states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
In short, Shover et al. classify states based on their enactment of medical marijuana laws, even though legal sales may not begin until years later. That makes sense insofar as they are seeking to replicate the results of Bachhuber et al.’s study, which took the same approach. But it could easily muddy the picture of what happens when medical marijuana is legally available.
On the face of it, a negative correlation between medical marijuana and opioid-related deaths is consistent with research finding that medical marijuana is associated with reductions in opioid prescriptions. But since the risks of addiction and fatal overdose among patients taking opioids for pain relief are quite low, that explanation seems inadequate to account for such a correlation, assuming it exists. Is marijuana an important substitute for nonmedical use of opioids? Maybe, but on the whole Shover et al.’s agnosticism seems appropriate, even if their method is not the best way to measure the availability of medical marijuana.
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New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Committee (LPC) just wouldn’t take no for an answer. The group has conferred landmark status on the 119-year-old building at 826 Broadway, which has housed The Strand Bookstore since 1956. The owners of The Strand bought the building in the late 1990s and the third-generation owner of the store, Nancy Bass Wyden, opposed the action, telling Reason earlier this year:
The Strand is not going anywhere. There’s no need to protect it. Our family’s been a great steward of the building. Landmarking would add another component of government. You add bureaucracy, you add committees, you add people having opinions about what we should do inside the store as well as outside the store. And that does not allow me the flexibility to change with the retail book environment and to serve our customers.
Bass Wyden (who is married to Sen. Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon) presented 11,000 signatures to the LPC in hopes of dissuading landmark status. Such popular support for what is generally considered New York’s best bookstore cut no mustard. In announcing the new status, the head of the LPC waved away any worries that the commission will be difficult to work with:
“I’m confident that the commission’s review of the masterplan and any future applications will provide [the] flexibility the Strand needs to remain nimble and innovative and to continue its important place in New York City, and adapt to a changing retail climate,” Sarah Carroll, LPC chairwoman, said at Tuesday’s meeting.
In an interview and video produced earlier this year, Bass Wyden begged to differ and described in detail the amount of bureaucratic hoops she already has to deal with.
We already have to go through the Building Department. We already have to get a permit. We already have to get an architect and an engineer. With a landmark designation, we have to go ask this committee that also oversees a huge number of other buildings in New York, and that will get back to us whenever they feel like it with an answer.
It took us two years to just complete the [renovation of the] front of the store without the additional layer of landmark status. When we did the restoration, we looked at the granite that was there before and we matched it. We did not need a committee to do that. We’ve operated the store for 91 years. We’ve been in this location for 65 years. We’ve owned the building for 20 years. We do not need their assistance.
New York’s Landmarks Act was signed into law into 1965. It gives 11 unelected officials immense power to deny property owners the ability to modify, renovate, demolish, and rebuild their buildings. More than 36,000 buildings in Manhattan—more than one quarter of the total amount—have landmark status.
Watch Reason‘s video documentary on The Strand, which was written and produced by Jim Epstein.
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A bitter policy fight is brewing on Capitol Hill over exactly how much money Congress should spend to keep the country safe.
At the heart of this contentious debate is the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a major piece of defense legislation that must pass each year in order to keep the lights on at the Pentagon and to fund America’s numerous, occasionally constitutional conflicts overseas.
Last year’s NDAA—passed in August 2018—spent $716 billion on various defense programs, which was more than twice the combined military spending of Russia and China that year.
This princely sum is apparently inadequate to deal with the security threats faced by the U.S. in fiscal year 2020, however, as lawmakers from both parties are now angling for a funding boost.
In the Democratically controlled House of Representatives, Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has put forward a proposal that would spend $733 billion on defense, which is in line with what the Pentagon was expecting to get this coming fiscal year.
In March, the White House upended that expectation by requesting a $750 billion NDAA, which would include roughly $675 billion for discretionary defense spending, plus another $75 billion for overseas military operations.
The Senate Armed Services Committee agreed to the larger NDAA in late May. Now Republicans are pressuring Smith to boost funding in the House’s bill to match it.
“In pursuing an arbitrarily lower budget, the proposal reduces or eliminates vital programs,” warned Rep. Mac Thornberry (R–Texas) in a statement to The Hill.
Smith’s bill in the House, according to Breaking Defense, saves money by scrapping plans for more nuclear subs, and spending less than the White House is demanding on new fighter planes and warships.
So far, the Washington representative is sticking to his guns, arguing that spending more than $733 billion might be fiscally irresponsible.
“I think we have enough history with the Pentagon to see it in the past, when they’ve been given more money than perhaps they expected, there is a lot of inefficiency and waste that follows,” Smith told reporters on Monday.
Despite the sparring, Smith stressed to reporters that the vast majority of the defense spending that Congress is now considering is controversial with neither party. “The amount of stuff that we disagree on is probably about 2 percent of the bill,” he stated.
This bipartisan consensus is a problem, says Christopher Preble, Vice President of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
“It’s absurd that the U.S. thinks the only way we can be secure is if we spend $750 billion or $733 billion,” says Preble. “The problem is we have defined our grand strategy very broad so that the only way we can be secure is if the whole planet is secure.”
Securing the whole planet is a costly endeavor. The reason why current budget debates are so marginal, explains Preble, is that both parties largely agree on this expansive role for the U.S. military.
So long as this consensus exists, not only will U.S. defense budgets continue to grow, but arguments about them in Congress will largely center around how quickly such budgets should expand.
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